Its planned release in 2,400 theaters further backs up the assumption that Love, Simon is a film aimed at the masses. Featuring such youth-courting cast members as Katherine Langford (of 13 Reasons Why (Neflix, 2017–present)) and made under the auspices of YA-driven production company Temple Hill Productions, Love, Simon has been positioned fairly unambiguously by distributor 20 th Century Fox as occupying the generic ground as such recent teen-centered hits as The Fault in Our Stars (Josh Boone, 2014). Briefly, the film follows Simon (Nick Robinson), a closeted high-schooler who begins to communicate online with a fellow closeted teenager who attends Simon’s school and goes by the pseudonym “Blue.” These e-mails are eventually discovered by another classmate, who threatens to out Simon to the school unless Simon assists his blackmailer in helping secure a date with one of Simon’s friends. ![]() Within this context, then, Love, Simon (Greg Berlanti, 2018) represents the first significant attempt by a major studio to widely distribute and market a film centering on LGBTQ characters and themes. Certainly, the aesthetic and/or ideological value of said titles are open to debate, but the sheer breadth of their reach gave them a visibility that many of the smaller, more targeted LGBTQ titles of recent years cannot compete with. One has to go back to the mid-to-late 1990s to find a sustained period in which such titles existed in Hollywood: To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (Beebee Kidron, 1995), The Birdcage (Mike Nichols, 1996), In & Out (Frank Oz, 1997), The Object of My Affection (Nicholas Hytner, 1998). What we haven’t seen, in short, are wide-release, mainstream films centered around LGBTQ characters. Titles like Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010), and Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) eventually expanded to hundreds or thousands of theaters on the strength of Oscar buzz and strong reviews, but their initial placement within the cultural and economic market framed them as art-house or “indiewood” titles aimed at more “discerning” filmgoers. ![]() While there have been many films with LGBTQ characters/narratives/themes released to critical acclaim and relative box office success over the last couple of decades, almost all of them were distributed and marketed as essentially prestige pictures.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |